Search results

To provide two possible approaches for enhancing organizational culture awareness and promote cultural change in public sector organization. These approaches include training and leading by example.

Literature outlining fundamental aspects of organizational culture is summarized, serving as a foundation for reviewing the potential value of training as a method for enhancing public managers' awareness of organizational culture. This is followed by an illustrated example of how the culture was changed in major department of a public organization through leading by example.

Training and leading by example can serve as effective methodologies for promoting culture awareness and brining about culture change in organizations.

The article highlights some interesting similarities and differences between cultures in public organizations and cultures in private sector organizations. The differences, in particular, reinforce the importance of training and leading by example to guide public sector employees through the complex dynamics often embodied within culture transformations in organizations.

While there are some important similarities between cultures of private sector and public sector organizations, the differences existing in public sector organization cultures create unique challenges for managers trying to evoke change. The article provides a unique perspective on applying training and leading by example to the context of public sector organizational culture.

This paper aims to consider the ways that students are shaped by and shape community and critical literacy, along with the ways that community affords student empowerment in an English class during a US high school summer enrichment program.

The qualitative methodological approach is a narrative-based descriptive case study. To provide a detailed and narrative-based discussion, the authors incorporate ethnographic observation narratives and conversational interview excerpts, and analyze the data through inductive coding.

Organizing the findings into two sections, “These kids are rebelling”, and “We’re trusting him to teach and do better now”, we first examine the ways that student-led rebellion reshaped the classroom community and then the ways that the teacher's response redefined critical literacy approaches and his interactions with the students.

As this is a qualitative case study that is set during a summer enrichment program, its implications are not wholly generalizable to secondary English education. However, this research does suggest the importance of student agency in considerations of community and critical literacy.

This research emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and exploring ways that students' everyday interactions and agency shape educational spaces. Additionally, this research suggests the importance of community and critical literacy to all teachers, no matter their levels of experience or success.

Students have tremendous potential to not only shape and define learning environments, but to transform pedagogy and teacher relationships. This research emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and exploring these implications specifically to transform community and critical literacy in a summer high school English classroom.

First, this paper examines student community as an agentive and rebellious influence within the everyday constructs of schooling, and the authors assert that critical literacy pedagogies may be student-driven as part of community-based activism. Second, this paper seeks to explore both “community” and “critical literacy” as key concepts in positioning students as influential and empowered stakeholders with capacities to reshape education.

We began this chapter with storied experiences of relationships with children and youth and of questions around tensions they can experience as they make home, familial, community, and school transitions. These questions included: Why do we do it this way? Who decides? Can’t I think about what's best for my child? For Aboriginal children? As Khea, Jennifer, and Brenda Mary storied the experiences noted earlier, and as we collectively inquired into their stories, attentive to the intergenerational narrative reverberations of colonization made visible, it was their attentiveness to the particular life of a youth, Robbie; of a child, Rachel; and of a grandchild that we were first drawn. Their deep yearnings for something different in schools also turned our attention toward the counterstories to live by which they were composing. Across Khea's, Jennifer's, and Brenda Mary's earlier storied experiences the counterstories to live by around which they were threading new possible intergenerational narrative reverberations were focused on understanding children and youth as composing lives shaped by multiple contexts, that is, lives shaped through multiple relationships in places in and outside of school. This need for understanding the multiple places and relationships shaping the lives of children and youth as they enter into schools is, as shown in the earlier noted stories, vital in Aboriginal families and communities given the ways in which the narrative of colonization continues to reverberate in present lives.

Purpose: Miscarriage is commonly understood as an involuntary, grieve-able pregnancy outcome. Abortion is commonly understood as a voluntary, if stigmatized, pregnancy outcome that people do not typically grieve. This chapter examines a nexus of the involuntary and voluntary: how people who chose abortion following observation of a serious fetal health issue make sense of their experience and process associated emotions.

Design: The author draws on semi-structured interviews with cisgender women who had an observed serious fetal health issue and chose to terminate their pregnancy.

Findings: Findings highlight an initial prioritization of medical knowledge in pregnancy decision-making giving way, in the face of the inherent limits of medical knowability, to a focus on personal and familial values. Abortion represented a way to lessen the prospective suffering of their fetus, for many, and felt like an explicitly moral decision. Respondents felt relief after the abortion as well as a sense of loss. They processed their post-abortion emotions, including grief, in multiple ways, including through viewing – or intentionally not viewing – the remains, community rituals, private actions, and no formalized activity. Throughout respondents’ experiences, the stigmatization of abortion negatively affected their ability to obtain the care they desired and, for some, to emotionally process the overall experience.

Originality/Value: This chapter offers insight into the understudied experience of how people make sense of a serious fetal health issue and illustrates an additional facet of the stigmatization of abortion, namely how stigmatization may complicate people’s pregnancy decision-making process and their post-abortion processing.

All too often tragedy and disaster strike the world around us, and when they do, people often are left speechless and powerless. In schools, there is no subject as uniquely situated to helping children develop an understanding of social events as the social studies; as history is filled with instances of loss, tragedy, and death (i.e. war, conflict, natural disasters, etc.). During these difficult times, teachers often encounter important questions from inquisitive children on these challenging topics. This manuscript discusses how an elementary social studies teacher leveraged the assets of children’s literature to assist her students in learning to grapple with the death of their beloved classroom pet. Parents and educators are provided literary resources and strategies to assist students in grappling with the concepts of loss or death.

This study is a radical interactionist analysis of family conflict. Drawing on both a negotiated order perspective and Athen's theory of complex dominative encounters, this study analyzes the role that domination plays in conflicts among intimates. As the family engages in repeated conflicts over roles, the family also engages in negotiations over the family order, what role each party should play, interpretations of past events, and plans for the future. These conflicts take place against a backdrop of patriarchy that asymmetrically distributes power in the family to determine the family order. The data from this study come from a content analysis of mothers with substance use problems as depicted in the reality television show Intervention. The conflicts in these families reveal that these families develop a grinding family order in which families engaged in repeated conflict but also continued to operate as and identify as a family. These conflicts are shaped by and reinforce patriarchal expectations that mothers are central to family operation. The intervention at the end of each episode offered an opportunity for the family to engage in a concerted campaign to try to force the mother into treatment and reestablish the family order.

DO you know what an opuscule is? I ask because I have just returned from Russia—where I found three opuscules on Mademoiselle Rachel. Or rather, I suppose them to be opuscules—obviously so: but then, what is obvious to one is not so to another, as the following anecdote will show.